Dealing with CC hurts because if I let myself be in the least bit vulnerable; I get torn to shreds. When he gets in PTSD mode, no information is transferred or accepted nicely.

Being aid, assistant and wife for a combat wounded Veteran Marine who has a brittle forty year old case of PTSD is not for sissies. The shrapnel he carries inside his body is also in the vortex of energy swirling around him. Get near him at your own expense.

Over the years, I've turned reactive, like his mother. If I could choose a person I most don't want to be like; it would be her. I perceived her as a self centered and mean spirited woman with few social skills. 

She was born in 1931 in Rhode Island to French Canadians (try imagining this accent - one of the less lovely ones on the planet). I met her when she was 61 and she was already set in her ways, quarrelsome, gnarled and permanently angry with her husband.

Everyday since I married CC, I've slowly inched into becoming just like her.  She is my shadow self, beckoning me towards madness. Her own creativity was bled drop by drop, eventually distilling into rage, despair, depression, low self esteem and dementia.

When she died; I found out she was much more than this. She was a chronicler. Kinda, sorta, a lot like - me. And when she died, she left me the grandest of all gifts.   She left me a story. I now believe she is a minor saint in the pantheons of Goddesses. 

In this story she left me to write; I am able to take some her circumstances to vent my own rage and despair after experiencing a particularly bad combat atmosphere in my home. I retreat into my office and slip into "Clara," my alter ego, a woman trapped early in life at a convent and forced to be a conformist. Someone married to her faith as well as to a male chauvinist. 

The funny thing is Clara transforms me and I transform her.   She gives me a way to vent my despair when my husband is having a bad day (which means all around him are also having one). She gives me a way to transcend the pain of living with someone mentally and physically disabled. Clara is filled with her Catholic faith and is constantly finding comfort through prayer in this story. My transcendence beyond writing is found by lying on the earth and letting her soak up my grief and pain. Whether it is Clara praying her rosary or me in the full embrace of Gaia, each of us eventually get up, ready to move forward without quitting.

It was CC's mom's Catholic duty to serve her abusive husband. By the end of her life she had become his jail keeper, just plain mean to him as he lay in bed unable to move anything but his right hand.

I always liked CC's daddy. He was affable, a flirt, outrageous. He could tell a good story, and I wrote many of them down. He was responsible and took care of his wife and family. By his death he was physically repulsive, but he never lost the glint in his eyes or the catching smile. Yet in my story of Clara, he is almost always the antagonist.  

It is my patriotic duty and privilege to care for my old warrior. I do not wish to one day be his prison guard, resentfully and meanly giving him care. CC is not evil and his verbal terrorism has always only been a small part of the whole package.  But I am sure this part of him has been with him since the war. I am, after all, his fourth wife.  This right there will tell you; he is not easy to live with. But if any of you have ever been married to a soldier (CC is a Marine - think soldier to the power of infinity); you know these men make you their country. In his company, I am perpetually safe, prepared and guarded.  No one can penetrate our perimeters. 

 This man has loved me and been here with me through some horrific and good times. He has been step-dad to my two sons since they were eleven and six and we've been raising our eleven year old granddaughter together since her birth.

Who am I to leave and run when I married him for better or worse?

I believe it is my duty, my right, my karma even, to be with this man; helping him balance his brittle emotional state, this sickness: a soldier's heart. His PTSD is like another country, a battle-torn one where the war has never been won.

Some days CC is like a rogue dictator hijacking any semblance of peace in our home with his physical pain and emotional torment. Other days, he is my savior, my best friend, the funniest man alive.

Somebody has to take care of all these people coming home from war.  I am a volunteer, just like today's soldiers in our all volunteer army. I will be there for him; though there are times I feel like the recoilless rifle round that crippled his right side just shattered my very heart.